The police man on the territorial surveillance window may have spotted his daughter in the wrong company at a strange part of town. The police woman looking out for criminals and terrorists might rather have seen her husband, supposed to be on mission somewhere in the northern part of the country, frolicking with their neighbour’s daughter at the entrance to a hotel in Douala. These territorial surveillance cameras, demonstrated to the Prime Minister at Police headquarters last week, will not only catch state offenders. They will also reveal social misdeeds and it will capture many reality shows!
Viewing the nooks and crannies of Yaounde on the giant screen served by hundreds of surveillance cameras planted discretely at different strategic points, brings shivers even to the lay about malingering during duty hours or people wont to engage in petty social mischief like accosting the wrong person on the street or doing anything wayward at little corners they believe no one can see because they believe they are at dead corners where no one is watching.
Big brother is watching you! Now we will get to better understand what the reality TV shows we are often glued to TV watching really mean. That expression became popular after George Orwell’s 1949 novel by the title Nineteen Eighty-Four (often written 1984 on the cover of various editions). Orwell, also author of the epic Animal Farm published in 1945, brooded over the overbearing presence of state security and intelligence monitoring in totalitarian Soviet Union. The phrase “Big Brother is watching you” is used several times in the book, after about every description of more or less ordinary scenes but which, according to the narration, are under surveillance.
Like in Cameroon in the Ahidjo years when walls were said to have ears, Orwell practically prophesied of the day that has come with Big brother watching us today wherever we are, be it in the democratic free world, in Third World dictatorships or in regimes under strongmen of all kinds elsewhere around the world. Besides offices and shopping malls, even homes and some bedrooms are now wired. Parents or spouses keep secret cameras to be abreast of what their household or spouses do in their absence. Household theft and living room quickies with the wrong person have been captured by domestic surveillance cameras. More modern technology even makes it possible to monitor home from mobile phones.
The Big brother Africa, Big Brother America, Big Brother Nigeria shows have been inspired by this in a more social sense. In the reality show, whatever housemates are doing, conscious or unconscious, cameras are always on them and people elsewhere see what they are doing, all day long, all night long. Big brother is watching us!
PM Dion Ngute – even he – was visibly marveled at the surveillance show at Police headquarters in Yaounde. What they let us see, like him, was the Yaounde street show, just a tip of the iceberg. What they did not show us, was what he said were astounding pictures of what the surveillance cameras capture deep down the nooks and crannies of the national territory.
The Police declared over 1,500 cameras were planted around the country with more coming. You bet the Northwest and Southwest, and Far North regions do not have the least.
But should you think that suggests the Police have the entire territory under control and can pluck out any suspect anywhere any time like a jigger the way God has the whole world in His hands, ask yourself how come crimes are committed and terror attacks still happen in the most industrialized countries with the most sophisticated military and intelligence equipment and men.
Back-to-school: wuna go back money!
Those who allegedly found clever ways of collecting payment to promote the campaign to end the three-year school lockdown that was not theirs in the first place, simply because they thought it looked promising and lucrative, must be jittery now over how to give account of the paid mission. As doubts linger over the success of the trumpeted end of the school freeze, some of the proponents are developing cold feet and finding the words to preparing the minds of the public for the project that now looks doomed, though it never truly promised to be a massive success.
In an August 22 Facebook post, Nkongho Felix Agbor Balla, one of the early voices in the campaign who was head of the Consortium when it launched the call for school boycott in December 2016 and January 2017, wrote, “Once they saw that civil society back to school campaign was gaining ground, they sent ministers and politicians to join and anger the people … And to ensure that schools should remain locked, less than 2 weeks before schools resumption, they handed down life sentences to Sisiku Ayuk and Co. Chai.”
Also hinting on the projected failure of the campaign, Frankline Njume, an unapologetic and vocal anti-Ambazonia activist, lamented the probable impact of photos gone viral on social media, showing massive exodus from the Anglophone regions. “Whoever shot the viral picture at a motor park yesterday somewhere in Bamenda, did a disservice to school resumption,” said Njume in a post on his blog, August 25.
Mancho Bibixy and his Coffin Revolution team, who initiated the back-to-school campaign, are obviously frustrated by the sudden eruption of fear in the Anglophone regions at the verge of the school resumption date. He blames it on threats by Ambazonia spokespersons after the life sentence passed on Sisiku and Co. Mancho took a swipe at those whose utterances triggered the new exodus back to Francophone regions and which could tantamount to a failed school resumption campaign. Said he in a social media post: “When liberators take a decision and their people escape to the oppressors house for refuge, we start questioning the intentions of the leaders. Any decision that is not people friendly is counter productive. History will judge us all.”
Now that the most optimistic figures have already acknowledged dark clouds looming over their prospects, what about those who took advantage of signs of success to make material gains or to make a name? Like Agbor Balla said, politicians tried to steal the show. But other civil society actors also tried to reap where they did not sow. Some who always have their eye on the money and are known for eating with both sides of their mouth, must be scratching their heads now, wondering how to justify their loud but unproductive campaign. How shall they give account? Reimburse? Or learn to stay where they truly belong and henceforth stop their ridiculous busybody gesticulations?
Are they pushing Dion Ngute to join Amba?
Just look at the way a Francophone minister spoke down at the Prime Minister! Let him be the Secretary General at the Presidency. With rank of minister of state, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh is not Prime Minister Dion Ngute’s boss. See the way he scolded the gentle, go-easy PM to steer clear of appointment of managers of State companies.
Following new regulations limiting the tenure of office of general managers and board chairs of State companies to no more than nine years, and seeing that most of those holding office have exceeded that prescribed limit, the PM requested of members of Government to propose replacements to companies under their supervision. That was done. Even if the PM was acting beyond his competence as some experts in public administration are saying, should the Head of State allow or charge a subordinate to disgrace his PM? As Dion is an expert in Public Administration himself, having supervised the training of public administrators at ENAM for many years, there can be contrary interpretation of spheres of competence and it is possible he was sure his actions were in order.
It is understood that Biya has delegated some of his powers such as the discretion to appoint certain top officials, including Directors General, to the SG at the Presidency, which implies Ngoh Ngoh was fighting his personal battle, not the president’s. And it is true that brushes between Anglophone PMs and Francophone SGPRs are not new. They were especially commonplace between PM Musonge and SGPR Marafa.
Yet, one must still ask, what do they really want from Dion? If he gets angry, flees into the bush, picks up a gun and becomes an Amba General, they would say Anglophones can never be trusted? But they know he is one of those genuinely opposed to the Ambazonia movement, not those who, like Governor Okalia Bilai says, support the movement by night and even finance it but pretend by day to be loyal. Which kind of humiliation is this for a humble, loyal man? And this is not the first.
In May, it was our own Paul Atanga Nji whom they prompted to tune a discordant war song against the PM’s sweet peace song that generated euphoria on his visit to the Anglophone regions. While Dion told the masses that dialogue was at hand and President Biya had conceded to discuss possibilities of a return to the federal system, Atanga Nji discounted it in an interview to a foreign TV channel and claimed that he had the president’s opinion on this in authority of confidential reports.